


blood red sentimental blues

by gatsbyparty



Category: Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Family, Friendship, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-11-06
Updated: 2015-10-25
Packaged: 2017-12-31 17:14:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,213
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1034264
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gatsbyparty/pseuds/gatsbyparty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Driven by vivid dreams about a brother she doesn't have, the Courier leaves New Vegas accompanied by Craig Boone in search of the past that made her the last, best hope of humanity, while figuring out how to make a life in a dying world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Sun rises over the Mojave, near six a.m; a shadow-relief woman kneels, cracked armor strapped over a frayed flannel shirt. Her hair is a torch in the half light. The gun to her skull is the breath in the mouth. The desert is silent.  
“Pull the fucking trigger,” the woman snaps. “We need to know. Do it.”  
The muzzle wavers, barks: the breath extinguishes the torch: the woman drops faceward into the tarmac. Boone settles into a crouch to wait, for a breath or for a funeral with no attendant but himself. The sun keeps rising to full morning. The heat bakes the sand. The Courier coughs, pauses, coughs harder, spits out a wet red fragment of bone, and turns her head to the side to look up at Boone.  
“Well, shit,” she says. He watches her, impassive. She gets slowly to her feet, probing the matted hair at the back of her head. Nasty, all busted up bone and half-dry blood squashing under her fingers. She needs a bath real bad all of a sudden.

“My head,” she says. She pushes her nose back into place with a little pop of cartilage, probes around the exit hole. A tiny bit of dried blood flakes off. “Come on. We got an hour at least to walk today.”

She makes no move to go, despite her words. The Courier pries a bit of her hair free, flaking dry blood to the tarmac. Her nose is flushed red with sunburn. She reaches for her canteen with one hand, still prying at her hair, pops the cap with her teeth, and takes a swig.

“Shit,” the Courier says again. “Well. That wasn’t entirely unexpected, I gotta say. I need a fuckin’ nap, though.”

“Like you need another knock to the head,” Boone tells her. “How many holes’ve you got now?”

The Courier pretends to count, going from the starburst at the back of her head, to the rings in each ear, to the spray of scar tissue on the bottom of her jaw from the first shot to the head, to her mouth and eyes and nose. 

“A whole bunch,” she concludes. “Come on. We got a way to go.”

The Courier gets to beating feet, and Boone steps to pace with no trouble. He knows this woman on an instinctive level, as much as he wants to resent it. Spend enough time with someone, watch their six for enough hours, sleep by their campfire under their watch for enough nights, and you come to know them. They reach for a drink after the same interval of time during infrequent bar stops. He could trace the stars of her scars in the dirt without having to look. He can keep up with her on a clear road no trouble. 

She doesn’t grin, when they make it back to the Lucky 38 two hours ahead of schedule, but it’s a near thing. The afternoon’s shaping up as hot and nasty as the morning, but the Courier gets to spend it lazing in her penthouse. It’s the kind of luxury she pretends to take for granted, since she isn’t a gawky piece of wasteland trash and no one gets to think she is for being excited about a big bed, but the gawky piece of wasteland trash kid inside of her is thrilled every time she rolls across the blankets. She showers, strips off her outside flannel and armor, and wears comfortable clothing. This is what it means to be wealthy in New Vegas. 

Hers, truly, this city, as much as anything in the desert has the luxury of belonging to something else. There’s a sickness to it. Coming back here makes her teeth crawl; she stays in the suite because the penthouse is full of screens, all of them looming as big as the sun, and even if they are lit with Yes Man’s face, she sees Mr. House in every reflection. And yet. There’s a sweetness to it. Routine and seeing the same skyline every time she wakes-as much as the Courier is a wanderer, as much as she is meant to pound the concrete for the rest of her life-it’s a refreshing change. For a time, she’s been happy here. She thinks she can be still, because happy and restless aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive; but then she thinks she rips at any excuse to leave, even testing if a shot to the head will kill her, and thinks maybe it wouldn’t be such a good idea to stick around too long.

“I can do what I want,” she points out to Boone, when she’s sprawled upside down on a rotting couch, riot of curls hanging freely. “How weird is it to be able to say that?”

Boone shrugs. The Lucky 38 is a lot quieter of a place with just the two of them these days. They’re the only ones who never found another somewhere to go to. There’s no adventure ahead, just the long endless hot days to fill. The Courier goes on supply runs as often as she can, tests her limits out in the wastes where there’s no one but Boone to see, runs her city with the reckless hand of a gawky piece of wasteland trash, spends more time with Boone than she does with herself. It’s a busy little life she’s built for herself, if a little empty.

“No NCR,” she ticks off. “No Legion, no House, just you and me.”

“Like you’re surprised,” Boone says. The Courier grins at him like she’s some kind of kid. She was shocked to learn that Boone could be funny, that he had a tough sense of humor like a rawhide strip that yanks out amusement whether you want it to or not. 

“I am!” she protests. “I couldn’t tell you a damn thing that’s more surprising to me. Come on, Boone. I’m a queen, I’m an empress, I’m the most important person in this city. You could not have seen that coming in Novac.”

“You idiot scapegrace,” he says, joining her on the couch. It creaks ominously. The Courier laughs and smacks him on the leg. There’s no force behind it. She’d never bring anything to bear against the one man in the wasteland that’s ever bothered to keep her alive. 

“Remember when I had soup for the first time?” she asks, eyes still creased with fading laughter. 

“You stained half the kitchen with blood,” Boone says. “How could I forget?”

“In my defense, it wasn’t my blood,” she points out. “You seemed suitably freaked out, though.”

“I thought you were dying on me. Again.”

“That’d be what, three times?” she asks lazily, rolling to struggle upright. “Maybe two. I can’t keep track anymore.”

“You need to stop relying on luck,” he tells her, but it doesn’t sink in anymore than it did the first hundred times. The Courier is the luckiest person in the Mojave; she’s a roulette wheel woman, took a shot to the head once now twice and yet walks the sands, pissed off the whole desert and come out of it not only alive but thriving. She sees no reason to not rely on luck. It’s gotten her this far. 

“Have a little faith,” the Courier drawls, sticking her toes under Boone’s thigh. He scowls, but doesn’t move away, which is telling. She’s been determinedly getting him used to human contact, like socializing a ghoul. 

“I have faith in you,” he says. “It’s everything else I don’t trust.”

She preens a little, rakes at her wild gold chrysanthemum of a head. Boone’s never seen a woman with such an abundance of hair, at least not one that spent any significant time wandering, and certainly not one as tough to pin down as the Courier. He doesn’t know how she finds the time to maintain it, but as vain and pretentious as she can be, she manages it. She scratches at the underside of her chin, where she has pinwheeling dark lines from the exit wound of the bullet that killed her the first time. 

“I haven’t died yet,” she says. “I’m sure you’ll cry at my funeral.”

“You could stand to be worried about it,” he says. She wriggles a little, slides around, plays at leaning against him then springs back. He isn’t worried. This a woman who’s hit on her own disembodied brain. She doesn’t mean anything by anything. She sneaks looks when they find water that isn’t shitting rads and can wash. That’s as far as it ever goes. 

“I’m the grim fucking reaper!” she says with a bark of laughter. “Why should I be worried about anything?”

“For one, you’re terrible at running a city,” he says. She shrugs at him. 

“No gods, no masters,” she says. “That doesn’t mean I can just hand it off. You don’t get it.”

Boone heaves a deep sigh. He must be scraping the bellows. The Courier pops a little snicker, picturing Boone’s guts as a splintery wooden barrel, his voice box heaving on rusty hinges. 

“I’m learning quick,” she points out. “And I got the Kings helping out, anyway. Come on, Boone. Tell me you think I can’t do this, an’ maybe I’ll believe you.”

Boone gives her a look. The Courier gives him one back. He’s got good solid features, and he won’t lie. The Courier expects his honesty now, got accustomed to it.

“You could yank the moon down if you wanted,” Boone relents. “You got me. But you’re shit for this city.”

“But who ain’t, is what I want to know,” she offers.

“Got me again.”

“Anyway,” she says. “Got us a safe place, didn’t I? Kept us fed? Armed? Even got your sorry dying ass off the Dam? Say I didn’t do well by you, Boone. Wouldn’t stop doing it anytime just so I could go off and die.”

“Yeah, well, you got a funny way of showing it.”

The Courier brings her legs up against themselves, tucking her toes under her behind, and leans around to nail him with a hard look. Hits him like a bullet, that look. Poleaxed like some idiot kid caught sneaking round by his parents. Not a beautiful woman, the Courier, but terrifying, and her eyes are wild as a coyote’s. Face is all sweet young woman til you see those eyes. Boone tries to avoid putting her in the kind of mood where she makes that face at him. 

“Hey,” she tells him, like she’s well and true offended this time. “Hey! Easy! That ain’t fair and you know it. Can’t ask me to stop doing what I do, that ain’t right.”

“I wouldn’t,” he says, and he means it as much as he meant his wedding vows. “Wouldn’t ever ask you to not be you. No reason to stick around if you were anyone else.”

She kicks him in the side, unfolding like a grenade bursting, but he can tell she’s mollified. Easiest woman in the wasteland to please, the Courier. Doesn’t ask much, only everything a man can give and then some.

“One of these days you’re gonna make me so mad I put a bullet in you,,” she says with no heat. She slumps back on the couch, sticking her feet firmly against his leg. The arch of her bare foot curves round his thigh. Looks young, but a woman, shot and buried. He lifts his eyebrow at her but she doesn’t move away. 

“You wouldn’t,” he says. 

“You sure got a lot of words today,” she says sourly. 

“A man’s gotta defend himself.”

“Should’ve left you in Novac, this rate. No one telling me where to go or what to do if I did. No ‘maybe you shouldna touched that glowing thing, you’re looking a little rad sick’. No ‘you almost cut my hand off with a can opener, you crazy bitch, who’s afraid of a can’.”

“Alone in the Lucky 38, maybe dead in the wastes,” he retorts. “Maybe bled to death in a Fiend camp without me to haul you out and feed your feverish ass even when you tried to strangle me in your sleep.”

“Easy,” she says, looking up at him from under her hair. “There might be someone in New Vegas didn’t hear you complaining.”

He slumps back, crosses his arms. Lord knows what crawled up her ass today. 

“You shot me in the head this morning,” the Courier says. “I got a murder of a headache. I’m sorry, Boone. I don’t mean nothing by it.”

She watches him flip his sunglasses down. She gets to her feet and stalks off, infuriated by his blind persistence that she’s going to get herself killed. Doesn’t he understand she’s functionally immortal? The Courier has never been very good at flighty impossibilities, never been much of a dreamer. She conjectures the future off the past, and going by the fact that she hasn’t died yet-shot in the head twice!-she isn’t going to ever. Can’t he just trust her? She hurls herself onto her bed, squashing down the kid inside that thrills at the soft blankets, and sulks into the fabric. 

“Don’t underestimate me!” she hollers.

“Don’t overestimate yourself,” he says from the doorway. She twists her head sideways to look at him, sees herself in his sunglasses. 

“You’re being a right son of a bitch today, Boone,” she informs him. “I’m generously going to forgive you as long as you make me dinner.”

This he does. Nothing fancy, true, but Boone is a decent hand with gecko meat and a working oven. She tears into hers ravenously, throws herself into eating as hard as she does everything else. It tastes good, like home. She isn’t much prone to introspection, but she does take a pause, inspects why the flavor of gecko meat should be so comforting, but she dredges up no memories earlier than her last birthday. She considers, even more briefly, that it might be Boone she’s comforted by, but rejects the idea. A person can’t be a home. She tries to make him laugh again, putting on a big show of an accent, pretending to be the King.

“Ah, well, ah,” she says, deepening her voice and moving the gecko’s head so the mouth flops open and shut. “Ah, ah, well, ah. How you feel about maybe headin’ back west for a bit?”

Boone has no outward reaction to the gecko’s head asking him on a trip for several moments. He flicks his sunglasses back up top of his head, crosses his arms, lifts his eyebrow. It’s more reaction than the Courier has seen in the entire time she’s known him. Maybe he’s finally cracking.

“Thought you weren’t gonna leave the city for anything,” he says. The Courier shrugs a little bit, a little nervously.

“Maybe I was lying a little,” she offers. “Never really been west. See the Boneyard. Hit on a super mutant. Sounds like a good time, don’t it?”

He watches her impassively. She hits him with that hard look again, and he crumbles without prodding further. 

“Want to know who I was,” she says with a tremulous little voice. She’s manipulating him, and he knows it, but damn, he can’t do a thing about it. “Not just who I am, Boone, you gotta understand what I’m talking about. And like you said, if it wasn’t for you I’d be rattling round up here all lonesome and I don’t like how that makes me feel. Ghosts all over.”

The Courier, in all of her bossy, charismatic glory. She folds up onto her knees on the chair, looking for all the world like a sulky child who didn’t get a gift. 

“Please,” she says, and that’s what cracks the rest of his resolve. The Courier doesn’t ask. Prods, demands, expects, wheedles, assumes everything will go her way and accepts it as her due when it does-but she does not supplicate. 

The Courier abandons New Vegas with all the same consideration to consequences she’d given to arriving: exactly none. She blows out of town like a tumbleweed on the wind, vanishing as one day fades into dusk. 

“What if there’s someone missing me?” she asks. Her hair is the only thing visible in the gloom. Boone thinks she might tangle radioactive cactus spikes in there so it glows. 

“Back there?”

“Back and back,” she says. He’s imagining the impish grin, but he knows it’s there.

“West.”

“Yeah. Maybe I got a mother or something. Maybe I got siblings. Think about that, would you? More of me, but boys or tall or something, and all hearin’ about me and being proud but not knowing me is me.”

Letting her run until she chokes is the only way to handle the Courier like this. He’s seen her charge a Nightkin with a penknife, still chattering her idiot mouth off. He thinks maybe she’s from some tribe back west, miles and miles ahead, and some woman who throws spears instead of bullets is sore missing her girl. He thinks maybe if she was gone, he’d sore miss her, too. Painful to be around, sometimes, more a reminder that he’s come this far but it isn’t far enough, sure. Familiar as a worn sock, though. Comforting to see on the other side of a campfire keeping watch. 

The Courier dreams that night, sees herself as some round tiny kid with a thick knot of curls. Grows up like a wild animal in some gutter wasteland shanty, alone except for the wind and sand. Own little country, there with her brother, get to thinking they’re the only ones left in the world. Maybe parents, some long ago days, but all she remembers is this brother, tall and tan and blond, quick with his mouth and his gun. Holds her hands when she’s kicking around on fat little baby legs so she doesn’t tumble over a rock and crack her head senseless. Makes her clothes, her food, coaxes out fever from mumps and chickenpox and infected scrapes.

Doesn’t see him much, once she’s grown and gone to run messages, but when she does, it’s questions like sniper fire, machine gun rattle words the whole damn time-pinging their history, making sure he remembers as well as she does. The little tribal boy who stayed with them for two days before his fever carried him off, the day she wrapped her blanket round her head and declared them king and queen of the canyon, when he burnt down a cazador nest and almost killed them both; she will not be the only one to bear witness to these stories.

She wakes, feeling a curious raw grief like she never has before. She scratches her fingers in the dirt, aching for a brother that does not exist, a brother that did not teach her to talk, or see her first shot, a brother that did not see his sister grow to become the scourge of the Legion and the last, best hope of humanity. She presses her face into the blanket. Her first word in the dream had been her brother’s name. She clings to it like a talisman, thumping with her slowing heartbeat. Gregory. She holds to it. It can’t be real. She doesn’t want it to be, because then her brother not only lost her, she lost him.

“Not so sure this trip is a good idea, Boone,” she says softly. He shifts, nearby in the dark. 

“Of course it is. Too late to go back, anyway. Already left.”

The Courier pushes herself up onto her knees, moves a little ways, and vomits. She sits back on her haunches, looking for the glint of Boone’s glasses in the dark. He catches a little moonlight, and she moves to him. 

“Ever want something you know ain’t real?” she asks him.

“Bad dream?”

“You could say that,” she says, shrugging even though he can’t see it. The fire’s gone out or been put out. 

“You want to talk about it?”

“Sure,” she says. “It was-me. Wasteland trash. All grown up with a brother. Makes me feel real hollow right now, I won’t lie.”

He sticks his arm out. She hears him rustle around for a second, knocking over the kettle as he fumbles, and then his hand lands on her knee. It’s as light as a dandelion.

“Thanks,” she says when he doesn’t say anything. “You got family left?”

The Courier wants to shoot herself when Boone pulls his hand away. Idiot, she tells herself, stupid little garbage. 

“Sorry,” she says. “I’m-a little graceless.”

“Carla,” he says a little roughly, startling her. “She was-she was pretty much it. Parents dead. Only kid. Guess you’re not the only one.”

“Most common story in the Mojave,” she agrees with a sigh. “Ain’t it though? Tell me about her, Boone. Something you didn’t tell me last time.”

She doesn’t think he will. There’s the snap and flare of a lighter, and the fire goes up slowly. Boone sets the kettle into the ashes, pulling his fingers fast from the beat metal when it heats up. 

“Liked red the most,” he says finally. “Hair ribbons and-I don’t know, for the shit women like, you’d know. Powder. Dresses. Always red, if she had the choice.”

She nods, watching the kettle. Had Gregory taught her dream self that a watched pot never boils? It’s getting harder, as the moments go by, to remember the dream wasn’t real. There’s a restless energy churning in her gut. The Courier scratches at her neck. 

“Aw, fuck it,” she says, getting to her feet and kicking the kettle out of the ashes. “If we’re both up we might as well keep moving.”

Boone looks at her with eyes caught by the fire, but he gets up and puts the fire back out.


	2. Chapter 2

The Courier tracked a man across the Wasteland with nothing but the clothes on her back and a shitty old rifle, guided by nothing but spitting fury and blind hatred. This time, crossing the Wasteland, there is no one to track, no need to race time. They can stop and take half the morning stalking a great big brahmin across the steppes only to eat it for lunch. They can make half-hearted attempts at bargaining with tribals along the route, the Courier growing more and more noisy and incensed with each rejected offer. 

“Where’s the Boneyard from here?” she asks at least once a day, staring blankly up into the sky as if trying to remember a route not taken in years. Can’t remember the last time she left Nevada, true. Can’t remember if she ever left Nevada, true. Boneyard is the pulse of the NCR if Shady Sands is the heart, though. Good place to go as any.

Sleeps on the way, rarely, mind prodding the body along through a glaze, boots dragging through the dust. Cold crawling feeling in her gut, no matter how hot the sun beats, no matter how hard her feet pound. Ain’t an escaping from it so much as a respite, when it fades in the hours on the road. She goes and goes and goes, shotgun clanking off her armor, shrieking at birds as they go overhead, spitting at Boone’s feet when he stops for the night and refuses to walk further.

“Sun’s sure hot,” she says listlessly, folding down slow from upright to crouch to sitting and watching Boone do the samem a little faster. “Don’t think I ever had a run this bad.”

“Uh huh,” he says, taking a sip of water. She pulls the fabric of her scarf a little further over her eyes, closing them and blessing the hot shade of it. They been stinging and stinging, for days on end it seems like. 

“Nobody really take these routes in the summertime,” she says, vaguely, words spooling out from somewhere not parbaked. “Water dries up.”

Boone don’t say anything. Doesn’t blame her. Doesn’t point out she was the one wanted to leave just that minute. He just tosses a canteen over and watches until she drinks, then lays back in the dirt. 

“Soldier boy,” she says. Maybe a slight head movement to acknowledge. Maybe the breeze. “How you gonna be military and then get wiped as bad as me by a little heat? You goin’ soft?”

Teasing, but she is curious. Lord knows she isn’t going to shy away from the desert, and he ain’t either, but they’re both lagging and moaning like a couple of babies on their first caravan. 

“Worn out,” he offers, sounding very tired. He yawns, even if the sun’s just reaching noon. The Courier yawns in response. Days and days of jerking awake from nightmares, from dreams with a hollow feeling in the gut. 

She puts her hands on the ground, looks at Boone crumpled in the dirt, then says, “Maybe we just take a little nap?”

After all, they got nowhere to be. They put out the bedrolls under a little overhang barely enough to keep the sun off, but the Courier is flat unconscious the second she starts to lean down. Dreams come again, of course.

Stranger comes to their valley for the first time. He’s darker than she is, sunburned, with the flat way of speaking common to the tribal kids the next valley over, and his left leg is crooked out to the side at the knee in a way that tells the brother it’s some kind of broken. He’s sitting under the rails of the Brahmin pen next to the creek, hopelessly smearing mud over his sunburn. The kid circles him suspiciously a few times, then squats on her haunches behind the brother.

“You okay?” the kid’s brother asks, standing awkwardly off to the boy’s side. Not close enough to spook, but close enough to be visible. The boy gives him the dirtiest look he’s ever seen from a kid barely old enough to walk.

“Nah,” he says darkly. “Leg’s fucked.”

“Do you want me to, uh,” he pauses, swallows, puts his hands on his hips. “I can bandage you up if you want. Carry you home tomorrow. Someone gonna come looking for you?”

“Nah,” the boy says again. “Well. Maybe. Auntie might. Bannage me, mister. Leg hurts.”

He picks the boy up as gently as he can, one arm behind his neck and one arm under his knees, but the boy’s heavier than his sister and when he straightens, he knows he jostles the poor kid. Boy doesn’t even make a sound, just sets his jaw like a little ring fighter and toughs it out. The kid scoots off into the house, vanishing quick into the gloom.

“What you doin’ down this way?” Greg asks, finally making the mental shift from ‘brother’ to ‘person’. It’s like working rusted gears free, with how rarely people come into this valley. The tribals steer clear and they’re way too far from the road for travelers. Most of the time it’s like the kid and her brother are the only people in the world. “Ma lost tracka you or something?”

“Ma’s dead,” the boy says pointedly. “Auntie sent me to fin’ the screws I flung and say don’t come back till I got it, they cost more than me.”

“She got a point,” Greg says thoughtfully. “Why’d you fling ‘em?”

“Bored,” boy says. “An’ I felled off your fence, mister, maybe put a fence on toppa it.”

“You got a name?” he asks the boy, ducking just a little to get under the doorway and into the shade. The boy relaxes immediately from a stiffness Greg hadn’t even noticed once the heat is off his skin. His sister’s sitting in the corner with a scowl on her face like she ate something sour, aimlessly moving twigs back and forth. She looks up at him briefly, notes the boy with a complete lack of interest, and keeps on a high-pitched conversation between the twigs. Greg sets the boy down on the table and goes to shut the door out of habit, but it ripped off in the last thunderstorm and he hasn’t bothered to replace it yet. 

“Marion,” the boy says, prodding at his busted knee and yowling with the pain of it. “Fix this already!”

Greg gets the roll of bandages from the cupboard. He has to keep a supply around, even more than good sense would expect, because his sister is always likely to tear something or scrape something or smash headfirst into something. He remembers being like that at her age, always wrist deep in the next mischief. He unrolls part of it, winds it around below Marion’s knee joint.

“This is gonna hurt,” he says. He jerks Marion’s knee back into alignment with the rest of his leg, then yanks the bandage up and around with his other hand. Greg is a lot of things, but he ain’t a doctor, not anything close. This is the best Marion’s gonna get here. Greg’s sister looks up from her twigs again, slanted-crabby mouth sliding a little into fascination, but once Marion stops howling she’s back to her game. 

“Your auntie might have to take you into town or something and get this wrapped up for real,” Greg says. He turns Marion’s leg side to side much more gently to examine his bandaging. Neat bang up job, he congratulates himself. 

“Nah,” Marion says with glorious assurance. “She won’t. Thanks, though, mister.”

“No problem,” Greg says. He puts both hands out as if he’s going to pick Marion up off the table, then twists the fingers off his right hand into the hem of his shirt. Marion is a baby, and back home that meant he was barely big enough to go to the outhouse himself, nevermind cross the desert alone on a broken leg, but Greg can’t exactly hike off and carry him home. “Your auntie, though. She really won’t take you?”

“Nah,” Marion repeats, drawing it out. With a touch of pride, he adds, “I’m a problem. She don’t like me around.”

“Oh,” Greg says, a little perplexed. His sister is a cosmic pain in the ass most of the time, but he wouldn’t ever not want her around. “Maybe you should just stick around here for a while then. Til you feel a bit better.”

“Yeah,” Marion says. “Sure. Got anythin’ to eat, mister?”

The Courier knows something is wrong from the minute her eyes crack open to the hot morning sun rising in direct view of under the overhang. How long they been out? She pushes up onto her elbows, looking round. Boone ought to be keeping upright and keeping watch, but he’s sprawled out on his back dead to the world. The Courier rolls to her feet, scrambling forward before she’s even upright, and crouches over him. Boone’s bright red and shiny with sweat. 

“Idiot,” she says. “Dipshit. What’s wrong with you?”

Boone cracks one eyelid to look at her. 

“Sun’s up,” he says.

“Why didn’t you tell me it was this bad?” she demands. They’re both sunburnt, she knew that,it’s impossible to avoid when you’re on foot sixteen hours a day and the sun is up for thirteen of them. But this is fucking madness. She can see blisters. “Gotta be sun poisoning. Idiot.”

“Don’t take out your frustration on me,” Boone says, grunts, and closes his eye again. In a fit of tenderness or madness, the Courier rests her palm on his forehead and pushes his slowly-growing hair back with the joins of her fingers. To her surprise, he presses into her hand a little. Feels nice, like she’s keeping him safe.

“Anyway,” she says after a minute. Her voice cracks. “Get you in the shade again? Get up.”

“Can,” he says. “Maybe….shouldn’t.”

The Courier’s a strong woman, but not enough to shove a decently-sized grown man in full body armor upright. She’s never been any good for deadlifts. She plops down in the dirt beside Boone with a gust of dust and a clank of steel. If he isn’t going anywhere, neither of them is. 

“Just gonna get worse if we don’t find a better campsite,” she threatens him. “Sun’s up for another ten hours, ain’t it? No shade, no water, an’ maybe I’ll stop listening to you and then no company, either.”

“Maybe you’ll shut your goddamn mouth for once,” he says. “Maybe you’ll leave me here and I’ll die in peace.” 

“Maybe,” she says, considering. “Proba’ly not. Get up on your goddamn feet and let’s go a little farther, Boone.”

“Alright, alright,” he groans. The Courier gets back to her feet and prods his torso with the toes of her boot until he gets up. The Courier drives him further than she meant to out of sheer spite, and by the time they stop for the afternoon Boone’s sunburn is furiously peeling and his fever is far worse and his skin is blistering all over. They camp in a rotting out shack on the side of I-15, kicking out worn bedrolls on either side of a busted table and shucking armor. 

"Homey," she says, flicking a dead spider off the cracked tabletop. "Regretting not speakin’ up, yet?"

"Nah," Boone says, looking at her like she is someone he doesn't know and doesn't especially like. To be fair, he looks at her like that kind of a lot. Lot of the time she's not quite sure why he sticks around instead of wandering off some night back to Novac. Lord alone knows she ain't easy to be around. Still, Boone doesn't show any lingering desire for death by Legion, and he don't show any interest in leaving. He peels off a long strip of skin, looking at it with mild disgust, and flicks it after the spider. “Itchy, though.”

"Yeah," she says. "That's what I thought. C’mere, asshole." 

She takes canteen and bandage from her pack-habitually does it with her right hand, because of the goddamn Pipboy on her dominant hand that gets caught on every goddamn thing- and sits cross legged on the table to be able to reach Boone's forehead easily. She wets the bandage and dabs none-too-gently at the long curling bits of peely dead skin. He stifles his squawk of pain with a hand over his mouth. 

"Sorry," she says, practically vibrating with amusement. "You're gonna scar. Tryin’ to look hardass for me?"

"Caught me," he says. His expression changes under the merciless scrubbing, going soft and almost fond. The Courier frowns at him, suspicious, pausing with the bandage at his eyebrow. A little more dead skin flakes off. "Ease up, sweetheart. You're scrubbing like a housewife with-" 

Locks up, snaps his mouth, stares a thousand yards into the Courier's chin. 

"Damn," she says on a long sigh, but she eases up. Might as well leave him with a little skin. After a second he eases up too, snorts out a little laughter. 

"Caught me by surprise," he says, doing much the same to the Courier. 

"It getting any easier?" she asks. The courier has all the softness and subtlety to her of a piece of sandpaper. 

“Just convinced you were Carla,” he says, voice carefully even. “No, it ain’t getting any easier.”

“Fevers can cause hallucinations,” the Courier tells him, with the same grim determination she once used as a lever to shift the Mojave. “Had ‘em real bad, right after Benny put me down. Thought the Doc was a cazadore and tried to light’m on fire, then thought he was an alien. Just knew he was somehow.”

“Yeah?”

“Didn’t ever say anything to him. Figured, if I did, might take me away on his ship. If I didn’t, it wouldn’t matter anyway, and I could leave.” The Courier shrugs. “Coulda been better for everyone if he were. Guess we’ll never know, huh?”

“You’re cracked, you know that?”

She blinks, thinks about pointing out the obvious, reconsiders, then does it anyway. “Least I know who I’m talking to.”

“Least I remember my first name!” he barks, startling her with the venom in his voice. 

“Yeah, well, I don’t see you in any hurry to go!” she spits, yanking the bandage away like she’s been scalded. She tucks her fist against the spray of scar tissue under her chin. Should have known something was terribly wrong the minute he didn’t pull away from her harried scrubbing. “Kept you safe, haven’t I? Fed us? Armed us?”

“You gonna keep bringing that up?” he says. He makes a weak attempt at a smirk, like that was a joke and he’s going to play at being conciliatory now, and she almost falls to it, almost gets caught up in a whole new nasty tangle of self-loathing and guilt. Guilt, for feeding a man and keeping him alive, guilt for mentioning it, for Chrissakes, like there’s something wrong with bringing a debt after it’s long since been made even on both sides. 

“Got a whole year’s worth of words saved up in there? You shut up!” she says, clicking her teeth together hard. His expression goes cold and nasty. The whole bang and smoke of the argument drops right out of her head and her scowl slides right off with it. “Damn, Boone, don’t worry me like this. You gotta lie down.”

“Get up, lie down,” he mocks, mimicking her higher voice passably well. “Roll over, Boone, don’t even bother pretending you left the military, Boone, just keep on following orders, Boone, that’s all you’re good for anyway.”

“Shut up,” she tells him, hopping off the table and circling round behind to judge the best angle for kicking his balance out. “You’re delusional. Shut your mouth, would you?”

“Don’t touch me,” he says, turning to keep her in front of him. Courier’s seen Boone a lot of ways, but never this restless kind of fractious-she doesn’t even know if he’s angry or afraid. He’s never seen her as a threat before. “Don’t you put your hands on me. Who are you? Why am I here?”

“Boone,” the Courier snaps. His eyes are gone all cloudy. She holds out her hands, palms up, and stops circling. 

“Why’re you looking at me like that?” he asks, watching her warily. “What? You told me to lie down, I’m going, don’t knot your britches on me.”

She presses her fingers to her forehead in an effort to ward off the oncoming headache, but it’s there alright.

"What is your damage?" she demands, crossing her arms. The Courier keeps her distance; there's no telling when he slips in and out of hallucinations, and if he gets hostile enough to fight she doesn't envy her odds without the equalizing effect of guns. She doesn't want to put him down like a sick dog behind the shed. He’s burnt a nasty, crisp red all around the edges of where his armor lies.

“Look like a turtle,” she tells him. “Easy, big guy, don’t get back up.”

“Come over here so I can break your jaw,” Boone says from the floor. She judges she has less than no interest in having her jaw broken and doesn’t move. A minute later a splinter pings hard off her chin. Sniper, and lucky. She makes her way to the ground herself, all her creaky joints settling and moaning to themselves.

“I bet death would be a mercy,” she taunts. “Regrettin’ not saying earlier now? We coulda been out getting…..fresh air and sunshine or….something.”

“Sunshine is the problem.”

“Go to sleep,” she snaps at him. 

“Gimme a stimpak.”

“No!”

“Why the hell not?” he demands, sitting up far enough to give her a furious, sweaty look. 

“You thought I was trying to kill you! What if it happens again when I got a needle stuck in your arm?” 

She ignores him, more or less successfully, until he falls asleep, wheezing and moaning like a bellows. More the idiot him for not saying anything about three days’ worth of sunburn, and more the idiot him for not wearing sunblock, one of the pillars of civilization. She knows that they were born after the end of the world and all, but that’s no excuse for acting like a savage. Even tribal kids, the garbage of the wasteland, know what sunblock is.

“Idiot,” she tells his back. “The hell is wrong with you?”

If he’s trying to die on her, he’s sure going about it in a funny way. She hopes he’s having awful nightmares. Deserves it, anyway. She settles down on her own sleeping mat, only mildly unsettled but too much so to sleep. The Courier knows she ought to get some kind of chiding herself, but who chides the chider? Catches herself moping more and more these days, and more's the pity. 

"Thought about how you're gonna find this kid?" 

The Courier bursts to her feet like a poprocket, the dim glow of the orange targeting sights of VATS pinwheeling around her pupils. She relaxes, very slowly. The whirring of her mechanical parts seems very loud in the dark. 

"Um," she says eventually. She lays back down. Her hands shake. She presses them to her face “Older than either of us. Not a kid. But-no, I haven’t.”

“Assumin’ it’ll fall into place?”

“Like it usually do,” she says, shrugging though no one’s looking. Boone says nothing more, and she assumes he’s fallen asleep again. She dozes a little herself, although not enough for one of those weirdly prophetic dreams. She wonders if the past can ever really be a kind of future; if you don’t know what happened, can’t it be changed as easily as anything? 

“Echo comes afterwards?” she mumbles, throwing one hand out to knock Boone awake and get his attention. “Hey. Hey! Hey, Boone.”

He doesn’t move, just snores hugely.

The Courier blurts an abrupt, enraged shriek that scares the absolute hell out of both of them.

“Listen!” she says. “Important!”

“What.”

“Is there a word for echoes comin’ then noise? Like, opposite.”

There is a long, drawn-out moment of silence. The Courier nearly falls asleep. 

“Deja vu,” he grunts. The Courier yawns so wide that both sides of her jaw pop. 

“Like,” she says, pauses to yawn again, “Like, if.”

“Go to sleep.”

“Nevermind!” she snaps. A chunk of dirt arcs out of the dark to her right and thumps off her temple. The Courier squawks and rolls over, pulling her arms against her chest to avoid the slap to her bicep she knows is next. "Go to sleep!"

It's a testament to them both that neither of them stirs after that, and indeed there are no signs of life from the rotting shack until well into the afternoon. The Courier lays bonelessly in the heat, covering her eyes against the sun's glare in the wall's cracks. She swipes viciously at her nose every few seconds. 

"Don't think it was the sunburn," she wheezes. Her voice is a snotty whistle. 

"Nah," Boone says from somewhere to her side. Her head is spinning too badly to track him. He doesn't sound any better than she does. The Courier moans, off a vague idea that complaining might help. She rolls onto her stomach, scrabbling off her bedroll in an effort to get to the relative coolness of the dirt below. She considers digging her own grave. 

Boone thuds off of something- the table? she thinks blearily-and then comes the noise of his vomiting with metronomic regularity. The Courier turns up Radio New Vegas. Mr New Vegas, the Courier thinks, is not only the only man she's ever loved, he's the only man with a tongue more suited to talking than her own. If the Courier's got a silver mouth, Mr New Vegas's got a platinum one. She sighs dreamily, pressing her forehead into her Pip-boy. 

"No more Johnny Guitar," Boone says. She shuts Radio New Vegas off. Boone wouldn't understand. Delivering the mail can get real lonely, silence and silence and silence broken up by static and Radio New Vegas. She moves off her Pip-boy. She inches back onto the bedroll, bumps blindly into Boone's back, and doesn’t bother moving away again. If he got her sick, he can do doubletime as a bulwark. 

She squints up at the roof and mumbles, "We're going to die."

"No."

"Uhhhhh," the Courier says to him, and then retches all down his back. He doesn't move. Could be so sweaty he didn’t notice, she considers. She reaches out, flips the hem of the back of Boone's shirt up to cover the vomit, and begins the painstaking process of rolling the shirt off him.

"What're you doin," Boone says flatly.

"Gotta bring fever down," she says, pausing to let tooth-rattling shivers pass. "You're sicker than me." 

"Nurse," he says, making a noise that could be a cough or phlegmy laughter. "Heheh. Eh heh." 

It takes both hands and several long seconds to haul Boone's arms above his head, and several even longer minutes to inch the shirt past shoulders, elbows, and hands. The Courier hurls it with all her strength. It flops feebly a few inches away, but the stink isn't so bad. 

"Blech," the Courier says clearly, then, "Yuck." 

She drops onto her back as heavily as a sack of potatoes. Boone blurs between himself and the little boy from her dream. She doesn't move until the sun has been down for hours, and then only to wriggle into the corner to pee. When morning comes again, she feels dull, vague concern, but it vanishes under a rising fever. There is nothing but the worsening throb in her head and the occasional heaviness of Boone mistaking her for his bedroll. The sun comes up or goes down. She makes no effort to track it.

She wakes, briefly, at a heaviness on her tongue. Sleep blur clears as she blinks. 

“What are you doing?” the Courier asks, somewhat strangled. Boone shifts his weight on her gut. She sucks in a ‘hurk!’ of air, shoves at his knees. 

“Get offa me,” she wheezes. 

“Who are you?” he demands. “Where am I? What do you want with me?”

“Boone,” she manages on another wheeze as he loosens his grip to let her talk. “Boone, it’s me. Get offa me.”

He sits there for a minute, fever eyes bright, tight choke on her neck and all the half-starved weight of him on her belly, then slides off and goes back to sleep.

It stops, as these things always do. She comes out of the fever far ahead of Boone, and in far better shape. She’s nothing to write home about, but she doesn’t look like a ghoul, either. 

“Eat it,” she tells him, slopping water into his mouth to get his eyes to open and then holding bread in front of his face. It’s been so long since either of them was truly conscious that she had to snap off the moldy pieces instead of cutting them off. Lucky there was anything salvageable at all, she knows. She gets a baleful, damp stare for her pains. 

“Bleh,” Boone says. She bumps the bread into his teeth. “Bleh. Don’t.”

“If you don’t eat now you’re gonna get the shits,” the Courier says with the wisdom of long experience. “Well. If you do you’re prob’ly gonna get the shits. But it’ll be worse if you don’t, ‘cause that’ll probably kill you. And I’m not hauling your corpse round the wasteland.”

“Reek like a corpse,” he says, around the solid hunk of bread she’s still holding to his mouth. “You need a bath.”

“You need two baths an’ this thing. Open your goddamn mouth and eat it.”

Boone gnaws listlessly as the crust. The Courier has seen dead men put more effort into movement. She smacks it into his chin. 

“C’mon,” she croons as he gives in and eats the bread. After a moment, she says, “So you said some things. I think I remember. You wanna hear?”

“No,” he says. She pats him on the head with her free hand. He struggles to move like a gutted fish; she braces her elbow on the ground to give the spaghetti of her arms some backup, pushes on his back with her hand, and shoves him up onto his elbows with enough effort to pry the Boomers out of Nellis. 

“Maybe later,” she says, winded. “Boone. Boone, I wanna go home.”

“Vegas?” he asks, lifting one finger. Another, he says, “Novac?” Third, he says, “Goodsprings?” Fourth, he folds them all back down and gives her the vague-eyed glare of the miserably ill. “Put us both together an’ we still got no home between us.”

Boone falls wobbly back to the floor. His hair is going damp with sweat even as the water dries in the heat. High summer in the Mojave is no joke, but they’re well safe in their shack. She pats his forehead again and wipes her hand surreptitiously on his bedroll. 

“Yech,” she says. “But listen to me. I wanna go home, okay? So you gotta get up an’ we gotta find this guy an’ we gotta just...figure out where that is.”

“Gotta find him,” Boone says wheezily. “What, I ain’t good enough?”

If Boone didn’t leave after the wreckage made of the two of them over the last months, he probably isn’t going to. It makes little sense to her, but then, few things about the post-Dam world do to her, and it’s hardly like there’s much else of a hot ticket happening in the wasteland. But if she doesn’t convince him for good about this, they’re gonna keep tangling on it.

“Course,” she says, with a weary little shrug that he doesn’t see. “Course you’re good enough. But there’s a lot more’a me than the parts I got for you, and I need to find this guy so I can figure out the rest of it.”

“Okay,” he says, wheezes and pants a little bit, then says, “Okay, I got it. I got it. I’m in for you.”

“Thank you,” she says, some kind of weepy soft blues welling up in her throat, bubbles of trust and fondness. “Thank you.”

“Yeah,” he says, and the Courier hears ‘you might be an automaton, but I ain’t.’ “Well. I stuck with it this far.”

“Gotta rest, then,” she says. The Courier pulls walls tight around her insides, locking up all those blue feelings away where he can't prod them.

“You got some cold eyes, you know that?” the Courier asks as she settles herself back to the ground, jelly-spined with the effort of breathing. A couple shivers rip down her back. 

“Yeah,” he says. He pauses for an unwilling tired groan. “And you got some crazy ones.”

Crazy-brain dream comes again after the fever fades. The Courier can’t catch a goddamn break. She figured on that already, but damn, is she crabby when she wakes up from them dreams. 

Kid's flat on her bottom in the dirt, scratching aimlessly with cracked fingernails. No vanity to her yet, but the kid’s brother sees it coming, in the proud way she holds her head. Not much depth to a kid that small. World is busy and clustered, keeping the Brahmin in her pen and chasing wind devils all day.

“I can read,” she says uncertainly. “Right? He ask me, that boy. That Marion. Want me to read him and pray him. What’s pray? What’s read?”

“It’s a way to talk to God,” he explains. Kid has no idea what God is, but she accepts brother’s word as law, soaks it up like she does everything else. “Reading is...Here.”

He writes the kid’s name in the dirt, waits for her to struggle with the sound of it. She knows her letters as good as anything else. 

“I can read,” she repeats, confident. “You teacht me?”

“Yeah,” he tells her. “You can do anything as long as you learn how. That’s what learning is.”

“Okay,” she says and gets to her feet. She doesn’t dust off her bottom, so when she gets to moving she sheds mud behind her. “Can we chase?”

“Dunno what powers you, little human, but it’s endless,” he says. “We just chased. I’m still exhausted.”

“No way,” she says scornfully. “Can’t be. You sat down for a hundred years.”

“Not even ten minutes,” he says, but he still plays tag with her.

Next time round the kid is barely more than an infant. Her hair is a wild pinwheel of curls, abundant in a way that says it’s never been cut and probably only given cursory comb throughs. The brother is younger here, too, so that it shows on him; no beard, wide through the shoulders but scrawny. Dirt on his hands, cracked nails; he’s trying to feed the kid, naked and wrapped in a quilt, but his hands are shaking too badly and she’s having none of whatever’s on the wavering spoon.

“C’mon,” the brother says, pleading and wheedling like a kid himself. “C’mon, kid, please, just eat it.”

“Ma,” the kid howls.

“Ma isn’t coming,” the brother says, his voice dropping out like a jump from a hill. “Ma is never fucking coming. Just eat the beans!”

The kid looks as aghast as only the truly young can, but there are no tears. She doesn’t submit peacefully, makes it clear it’s a concession, but she eats the beans. Tears crawl steadily across the brother’s face. 

“Da,” the kid mumbles into his neck when he picks her up, patting the back of the tangled little scalp. He goes bright red, patting a bit too hard so she squawks.

“No,” he says gently. “No way. Not dad.”

The Courier wakes cold and alone in the dirty Mojave predawn. Fever’s gone from them both so she calls an end to vacation and they get moving. Desert rolls on by, making good time at first; they catch rides with passing caravans, turning a week-long walk into two weeks and then a month as they wander campsite to campsite. Courier gets them unpleasantly lost several times, and they manage it. 

She feels like a bruise. Small. Unpleasant. Weird colors. Got to be careful not to touch where it hurts. She lights the fire while he sets up camp, hissing and spitting at the little burns the matches leave on her fingers. Something the Courier's never understood, how little hurts can be worse than the big ones. She keeps watch for the first half of the night, stares wan and wide-eyed into the arch of the Mojave night sky. Ain’t a memory in her head of the days and nights before Benny put his blessed bullets into her head and wiped it all away. She knows she's traveled. She can read and write a sight more than most folks. She can shoot a gun and hit any target with both eyes closed, she can talk her way out of anything, she can pick locks with ease she's never seen matched by anyone. Criminal skills. Like she was made for this life, sometimes, born for unfathomable destruction to fuel wanderer hungers.

She leans back a little to make the stars sweep across her vision, then leans forward again and puts her elbows on her knees.


End file.
